This isn’t something you’re supposed to realize on consideration. It’s just straightforwardly what the movie directly portrays.
It’s a common trope in time travel stories that the changes don’t propagate until you return (e.g., “A Sound of Thunder.”) That’s all that happened. Nothing to see here.
Except that that obviously isn’t how changes propagate in the BttF setting. If it were, the various photos wouldn’t have changed, and Marty wouldn’t have started fading while he was in the past.
Ok I’m sorry Idle Thoughts is right, I thought he meant the whole movie before Marty ever time travels Doc is aware of what is going to happen.
Mea Culpa
OK, here’s a challenge to anyone who claims it’s consistent: How is it that the photograph changed, but not Marty’s memories? If his brother faded out of the picture, why didn’t he also fade out of Marty’s mind?
Because we don’t see the aware Doc’s scenes, he probably wasn’t saying quite the same things in quite the same way. I expect it was stilted and awkward, much like when Bill Murray is trying to recreate the spontaneity of the snowball fight in Groundhog Day.
It’s cute, but there’s no Marty 2. Just Marty 1 at different points along his personal timeline, and if Doc hadn’t sent the so-called ‘Marty 2’ back to 1955, then that would have caused a paradox, itself.
I thought Doc Brown said (with drawings) that changing something created a new time line. All of the time lines exist, Doc and Marty exist in whichever time line they create.
[quote=“Hail_Ants, post:17, topic:680056”]
Just wanna say two things:
[ul]
[li]Lest anyone forget, we are now only months away from the second film’s 2015 setting(!)[/li][li]Years & years ago Michael J. Fox was on Letterman and he mentioned that fanboys would often come up and ask him crazy, complicated time-travel theory questions like these. He said he’d very politely just shrug and say, “I don’t know, they just pay me to walk around and say lines…”[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
I think a thread asking how Marty would respond to the real 2015 would be a lot of fun. We’re close enough now that we’d probably have pretty good guesses.
Over Christmas we watched this movie with the family. I was a teenager when the movie came out and my parents grew up in the 50’s so our family relates well with the movie. Now we have kids who are becoming teenagers so they get to watch how their parents perceived an idealized teenage life to be and how their grandparents perceived an idealized teenage life. I think this is part of why this is such a timeless movie and it’s funny to think that what seemed so cool and modern to us when the movie came out now looks as dated to our kids as the 1955 section looked to us back then.
When Marty first arrives at the Twin Pines Mall, I always noticed that Doc gives him a head-to-toe look. My interpretation was that Doc was thinking: "Oh, yeah. I remember that outfit from 30 years ago.
Because Marty doesn’t have a photographic memory.
Human memory is complex. It’s constantly refreshed, updated, modified, and reviewed. Marty’s memory does change along with the picture, just not in ways that are obvious to us, or maybe even to him, during the time we’re observing.
Once the changewave Marty initiated by pushing George catches up to Dave, it spawns a secondary wave that makes Dave unhappen. This is the point at which he starts to disappear from the photo. Doc points this out to Marty, and explains that it means Dave is being erased from existence. This is a new event, and as such, creates a new memory. It’s likely that Marty spends at least some time thinking about this between that point and the point at which Dave disappears completely from the picture; this activity also produces new memories, possibly including memories of reviewing his memories of his brother.
By the time Dave is completely gone from the picture, Marty doesn’t actually remember him at all. He remembers remembering him. If you questioned him about his brother, there would be huge gaps in his knowledge; anything he didn’t actively review after the picture started to fade would be lost, and everything that was left would be at one remove. He might remember thinking about the time Dave pushed him in the pool, say, but not remember the actual event. No one quizzed him about Dave’s life on-screen, however, so from the viewer’s perspective, remembering that he had a brother who got erased appears the same as remembering his brother directly.
When the key events of the original timeline were reestablished by the kiss, temporal hysteresis caused everything to snap back to the way it originally was, not to the new confident-George configuration. That’s a new changewave, and has to propagate separately. It was probably propagating faster than the one Marty triggered by pushing George, since it created fewer and smaller secondary changewaves, but it had only had a few minutes to do so, so Marty’s memories had not yet been affected; they’re all of his original timeline at this point.
The confident-George changewave continues to roll forward as Marty plays “Johnny B. Goode”, says his goodbyes, changes clothes, and finally meets up with Doc, but it hasn’t caught up with him by the time the displacement field takes hold, temporarily separating him from the timestream. Disassociated from normal time, Marty perceives the trip as instantaneous, but while he is in transit, the changewave catches up to 1985. When he reenters the timestream, the changes have already taken effect, but he wasn’t there to be altered, his memories of the original timeline remain.
If Marty played Johnny B Goode, which gave Chuck Berry a “new sound” he’d been looking for, then does that mean that in his own time-line there was no Rock and/or Roll until Marty invented it? Did he come from a non-rocking timeline?
Rock and roll existed prior to Chuck Berry. There are several other Black artists who were playing the genre before he picked it up.
Side note: You don’t have to actually go to the future to change your children’s behavior in the future,
Good question blindboyard!
It seems obvious from the very beginning of the movie that Marty has a love for Rock and Roll… so maybe he was coming up with it on his own or maybe he just loved what he already heard and was going to join the bandwagon. But then again, the movie opens with Huey Lewis & the News, who obviously couldn’t exist in a timeline where real rock had been invented yet. So I think that answers that!
Although, I do kind of like the idea that, thanks to Marty’s changing the timeline, Huey Lewis decided to form a rock band, instead of going into school administration.
New nitpick, that I have never read anyone comment about before.
Doc’s bullet-proof vest won’t stop AK-47 rounds. He’s still dead.
Second nitpick that bothers me more: in 1955, Doc is planning the rig needed to get the 1.21 Jiggawatts into the DeLorean. He obviously does the math, and stations the car at the right point to start its acceleration run so that it passes the electrical cable at precisely the correct time. But the car doesn’t start! Marty spends precious seconds (seems like 20) getting the car started. But if the timing was so precise, by starting late he missed the lightning bolt by a ton.
And it’s so easy to fix-all Doc had to do was string the cable lengthwise down the road. Then timing isn’t an issue at all! Just have the DeLorean follow the cable like a trolley, and whenever the lightning hits, serious shit happens.
Perhaps the local gendarmes would object.
Yep - stringing a long cable is still time consuming and costly. They’re near a desert so why not just put a big antenna on the car, go out on the highway at a constant 88 MPH, and drive until a bolt of lightning hits them. With relatively sparse terrain it’s a virtual guarantee he’ll be hit by lightning sooner rather than later. Heck - the Doc could even rig a device similar to a parasail to get a wire even higher up all but guaranteeing a hit. A second advantage to this is that when he travels into the future he’d still be on a relatively isolated road rather than the middle of downtown driving 88 MPH towards a row of buildings!
I once heard a interview (not sure with who) where they were discussing which part of the trilogies has the most Delorians. I believe they said at one point in the movie, there were five Delorians in the same period, but I can’t for the life of me remember which time period it would be. Does anyone have any clue which time period in the BTTF trilogy would have the most Delorian Time Machines?
I can come up with 4 at one time - the morning of the climactic dance from the first movie.
Delorian 1: the one that Marty used to come to 1955 in the first film that’s sitting in Doc’s garage.
Delorian 2: The one Biff stole in 2015 and took back to give the sports almanac to his younger self.
Delorian 3: The one Doc and Marty took back from 1985 to correct the paradox old Biff is creating - it’s parked behind the billboard Marty originally hid the car behind.
Delorian 4: The one Doc took back to 1885 that, at this point, is buried in a mine chamber